1 December 2008
Maputo — Mozambican President Armando Guebuza on Monday launched a new "Strategy to Accelerate Prevention of HIV Infection".
Launched on World AIDS Day, this strategy is the government's response to the need to control the spread of AIDS in Mozambique, and to reduce the number of new infections. The latest statistics indicate that 16 per cent of Mozambicans aged between 15 and 49 are infected with HIV.
The epidemic shows signs of stabilizing in the centre and north of the country, but is continuing to advance in the south. The worst hit province is Gaza with an HIV prevalence rate of 27 per cent.
The strategy document states that the key factor in the spread of AIDS is "the existence of concomitant sexual relations with multiple partners with little or no use of condoms".
Contributory factors include gender and economic inequalities, high population mobility, alcohol and drug abuse, and failure to discuss sexuality, sex and AIDS inside the family.
The strategy lists the "priority areas of action" in the following order: health counselling and testing; condoms; high risk groups; early detection and treatment of sexually transmitted infections; male circumcision; prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission; access to anti-retroviral treatment; and bio-security (i.e. the safety of hospital equipment and the blood supply).
The document admits that previous attempts to increase condom use have run up against "cultural and religious barriers" and an ideology of male supremacy. But there have also been failures in distributing condoms particularly in the countryside, while selling them, rather than giving them away, tends to reduce access. The messages about condoms, it adds, have been "inadequate to the reality of socio-cultural values", and failed to address different age groups.
So the strategy calls for a radical rethink on how to popularise condoms and for the production of "communication materials appropriate to the Mozambican context, for both male and female condoms, including material to be used by community leaders and counselors in initiation rites".
The logistical capacity to distribute condoms must be improved, and priority should be given to reaching highly mobile groups in the country's "development corridors" that radiate out from the main ports to the countries of the hinterland.
Speaking at the launch of the strategy, Guebuza stressed the role of leadership in making citizens aware of the need for "positive behaviour" as the only way to overcome the epidemic.
"Leadership should bring us to understand the fact that, since there is still no cure for this scourge, it can only be beaten if we adopt behaviour and attitudes that remove the possibility that we will become infected or that we can infect others", he said.
Prevention, he added, was cheap, available and within everybody's reach. Victory was possible, and there were already "examples of good practices which can be replicated".
Guebuza said that, despite the apparent stabilization of the epidemic between the epidemiological surveillance rounds of 2004 and 2007, in no province had there been a sharp reduction in the number of infections. That had led the government to decide that the prevention strategy must be improved.
It had set up a "Prevention Reference Group" which had produced a report leading to the government adopting the new strategy at a meeting of the Council of Ministers last week. "The new prevention strategy calls for speed, greater impact and effectiveness in our actions, and the production of results", declared Guebuza.
He also urged Mozambican to visit the counselling and voluntary testing services en masse, because "the sooner the virus is detected, the greater will be the chances of success of Anti-Retroviral Treatment".
The number of HIV-positive people taking the life-prolonging anti-retroviral drugs had risen from 6,000 in January 2005 to over 100,000 now, Guebuza said, and the treatment is available in all 128 districts.
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